Gears of War 3 Horde 2.0 mode impressions

At E3 Microsoft and Epic Games were presenting a behind the scenes look at more of Gears of War 3. We met with Cliff Blezinski who gave us a rundown of Gears of War 3. At first we were shown the demo level that was displayed during the Microsoft press conference where both himself and Ice-T were on stage playing cooperatively. A few things were different this time however.

This time around, Cliffy entered the new Silverback machine himself to show us how well it handled and how powerful it was on the battlefield. The Silverback has an overheat warning that increases when you sprint or shoot your gun, and causing the machine to overheat will make you become stuck in place momentarily. The Silverback also has the ability to deploy itself and become stationary, allowing the user to shoot missiles rather than machine guns. The user can also hop out of the machine while it is deployed and take cover behind it himself.

Once he dislodged the Leviathan like in the demo, he was able to actually enter into the other side of the mission, which saw him playing as the team on the bridge instead of the one on the ship. Here we also saw a new weapon that two players can carry cooperatively, a chain gun with an ammo box. The second player will carry the ammo box and crank ammo to the one using the chain gun, providing the user with a constant stream of bullets that easily tore through the enemies that stood between him and his objective.

After playing through the demo level, Cliffy revealed some new information about the Horde 2.0 mode which will be placed inside of Gears of War 3. Being the most referenced title around when someone mentions a game mode about surviving waves of enemies, he knew that Horde 2.0 had to have plenty of new changes to the formula.

First and foremost players will be able to accumulate the newly added money system by either killing enemies or completing side objectives that can be introduced each wave. This money can then be used to buy either barriers, turrets, sentry guns, other weaponry and even a Silverback itself. The barriers, turrets and sentry guns all can be upgraded by spending more money on the fortification and the barriers themselves can upgrade from simple barbed wire, at least up until an electrically charged beam fence.

Horde 2.0 will be harder than ever however because rather than facing a number of opponents every round like the standard, every 10th round will begin a fight against a boss monster which can range from a fully armed Brumak to an even larger creature that players will have to survive against. Don’t worry if you die though, you can buy your way back into the round by spending a some money that most likely will increase every time you die. Gears of War 3’s Horde 2.0 mode looks like it borrows a few things from another successful survival mode and makes it their own, creating a familiar but upgraded experience that most if not all Gears fans should find hours after hours of enjoyment with.